Thursday, December 8, 2016

What Do They Mean By "Climate"?

A few days ago (actually, on November 13th, so not just a few days ago) I wrote the following comment on the American Thinker site, to an article about "Trump and Hillary on Climate". (Mine was a scientific comment, the site and the article are political. I don't argue politics here, I am a scientist who tries to inform, even in the current general insanity.) I would not be bringing this up here, except that yesterday I visited the Climate Etc. site of Dr. Judith Curry, and read a comment there that led me to ask the question in the title of this post. The comment stated--with utter assurance, of course--that the global mean surface temperature (and "global warming" too, if my memory serves) has nothing to do with climate. Since I have been trying for a long time to inform everyone, in my own posts and in comments elsewhere, that there is a difference between what they appear to mean by "climate" and what I take to be the "global climate"--just that which is in fact claimed by the alarmists to change with "global warming"--here is my American Thinker comment (it would be a minor miracle if any of the regular members of Dr. Curry's ongoing "sociology of climate" therapy sessions--the Climate Etc. site, I mean--were to read this and take it to heart; the insanity is too entrenched in them). My comment began by responding to another comment that the climate alarmism was a "scam".:On the political side, it was a scam, and even more, a criminal conspiracy, as is evident from the Democratic Party Platform specifically calling for suppression of "climate skeptics", taking away their very right to free speech in the public discourse.On the science side, it should be emphasized that the incompetence of the scientists and the rise of false theories initiated and still maintain the political alarmism. Nothing illustrates this more forcefully than the line in the above article that climate is "the weather conditions prevailing in an area", while as Kwan's comment illustrates, people are induced to believe in "global warming", which is not "in an area" but a global average. Climate as "the weather...prevailing in an area" varies hugely over the Earth, from tropical heat to polar cold, and from desert dryness to rainforest wetness; but the global "climate", as defined by the global mean surface temperature, it turns out is quite stable--varying by no more than one-half to one degree centigrade, over any time scale--and its precise value is due only to our distance from the Sun and the thickness of our atmosphere. Even the difference in temperature between night and day, and the difference in the seasons, does not affect the global average temperature, because night and day are not global but hemispheric, and the same for the seasons (which are reversed between the north and south hemispheres).The political alarmists, from Obama on down, changed the talking point from "global warming" to "climate change" when it became widely known that there has been an extended "global warming pause" in which the global mean surface temperature has clearly not been increasing, even according to the climate scientists' fraudulently "adjusted" temperature data. Even their calling it a "pause" in global warming, rather than the disproof of the global warming theory that it is, showed their fraudulent, unscientific bias and their willingness to lie to the public to control any public debate. This lie is on a par with the Benghazi lie, that the attack was a reaction to an anti-Muslim video.The climate in an area can change, but the global "climate" is precisely fixed, utterly stable (as my own 2010 article, "Venus: No Greenhouse Effect" makes clear, to any competent scientist and hopefully to any lay reader, who I wrote it for).